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Topic: Smartglasses may open a new window of opportunity for fan translations (Read 747 times)

The news of 'Smart-Glasses' as an upcoming technological development means that a new window of opportunity is open for fan translations! Using your phone camera and augmented reality to translate various text in printed books has already been demonstrated. This could even mean the death of the patch as we know it, because translators will be able to make custom patches to recognize various fonts, dialogues, and even graphics like title cards. A multitude of other things will now be available to users of all languages! This is actually amazing, when you think about it! What do you guys have to say about this? You could even enable it on some TVs with this kind of technology, so no glasses needed, but imagine what could be done!

I echo the sentiments already expressed. Try using OCR on a SNES RPG with machine translation and see if you enjoy the results. Unless you mean it'll recognise specific images that you specify and replace them, which sounds like more trouble than it's worth. Also, wouldn't everyone have to be wearing these things if a group is watching?

Smart glasses with Google instant transmission may be just about acceptable with restaurant menus and the like, but no, we're not going to be replacing human translators, or the act of hacking a game to other languages. Not yet, anyway.

I'm not really talking about machine Google Translate type stuff, but loaded files that are created by a team and customized to recognize certain points of the game and give them accurate translations. So, in a sense, it's kind of like a patch, but you won't need to use an IPS to modify the data.

I'm not really talking about machine Google Translate type stuff, but loaded files that are created by a team and customized to recognize certain points of the game and give them accurate translations. So, in a sense, it's kind of like a patch, but you won't need to use an IPS to modify the data.

Well, you would hardly need glasses for that. You could use a sort of custom emulator that recognizes screens (or particular ROM accesses) and displays translated text appropriately, without having to alter the ROM.

People could do that already with LUA scripts in certain emulators if they wanted to, if I'm not mistaken, but it does not appear to have ever caught on. A number of concerns come to mind: it ties the translation to a particular emulator, which might not be portable to different operating systems. It eliminates the possibility of using the translation on the original hardware. And if you're going to go through the trouble of dumping a game's script already, the additional hacking to put a translation back in isn't necessarily much of a stretch.

I'm not really talking about machine Google Translate type stuff, but loaded files that are created by a team and customized to recognize certain points of the game and give them accurate translations. So, in a sense, it's kind of like a patch, but you won't need to use an IPS to modify the data.

I got that, but there's a problem with that. How does it recognise that point? From a screenshot? So you need screenshots of every part of the entire game? If not that then how? Jorpho summarised it pretty well: once you've got the text dumped, it's not so much more trouble to get it in the ROM. Besides, part of the fun of ROM hacking is making a Japanese game as if it was officially released in the West, with the same limitations.

I guess I'd need to know more about how these glasses are supposed to recognise the text.

Well, you would hardly need glasses for that. You could use a sort of custom emulator that recognizes screens (or particular ROM accesses) and displays translated text appropriately, without having to alter the ROM.

People could do that already with LUA scripts in certain emulators if they wanted to, if I'm not mistaken, but it does not appear to have ever caught on. A number of concerns come to mind: it ties the translation to a particular emulator, which might not be portable to different operating systems. It eliminates the possibility of using the translation on the original hardware. And if you're going to go through the trouble of dumping a game's script already, the additional hacking to put a translation back in isn't necessarily much of a stretch.

Sounds like the SNES9x mod Tomato has been working on and used in his streams (though I think he only used it for Super Mario RPG, he might have been using his own program before) to play a game in English while displaying Japanese text in another window. Though that required him to dump both scripts.I think he planned to release it eventually but he's busy right now writing a book on his Final Fantasy IV Google translation, I think.

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